In October 2009 n.e.w.s. had organised an open call for proposals http://northeastwestsouth.net/node/392 which looked at implementing the Shadow Search ideas http://northeastwestsouth.net/node/395, developing an algorithm that would find off-the-radar or stealth activities. The winner and 4 shortlisted proposals answered our initial query but also led to more questioning regarding the nature of search and its future potentials and well as pitfalls.

We are now working on developing the Shadow Search Project (SSP), a platform for rapid prototypings and a fleamarket for shadowy search algorithms. It will also look at retrieval systems as filters. What we are planning to develop at this meeting is the backstory, the backend of what the concept of 'search' envelops. This search project (SSP) intends to go beyond interface design.

n.e.w.s. would like to continue with the second competition of the Shadow Search Project (SSP) by putting forth an open call this summer with something that might be entitled ''(Re)search'. Now we have all this information how do we find what we are looking for?

Paid Usership The utopianist vision of the World Wide Web as a place for the boundless sharing of knowledge and ideas, free from patents and royalties, comes from its founder Tim Berners-Lee. Nothing, he felt, should be easier and more universal than distributing information and standards like oxygen; his World Wide Web Foundation wants to "advance the Web to empower humanity by launching transformative programs that build local capacity to leverage the Web as a medium for positive change." Accredited to applying the concept of links (hyper-text: coined by Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart in 1965) Berners-Lee's hypertext database system, somewhat like a wiki, has led to distributing knowledge between colleagues and is now the basis of how we share information and “pay” attention to others. Since its inception, n.e.w.s. has sought to maintain a model of payment (or partial payment) for content online. Contrary to mainstream practice – with its residual romanticism of solitary authorship and single-signature value – we at n.e.w.s. contend that value is always collectively produced through linguistic cooperation (polemics or just idle chatter) – that is, through the collective intellect. Of course people already get paid for online content – but they are often the wrong people, because they are not all the people who worked to produce that content. Our paradoxical objective is to leverage the potential of participative technologies and communities to ensure that user-produced value be remunerated. Because n.e.w.s. is a non-commercial platform, without any institutional structural subsidy, we have been investigating alternative models of exchange and collaboration, retooling our critical lexicon: instead of the seemingly self-evident binaries of producer/consumer, we have opted for the more inclusive and extensive category of usership – of the paid variety.

Godard, paid to watch

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is”, said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

This little spectacle of the absurd from Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland , is perhaps the most demonstrative of the verbally ectropic times that we live in. Never before has the logocentric human civilisation(s) produced so many words, mutating, mixing and distorting languages and grammars, to produce words, so many, so nuanced, so familiar and yet distant, that they mean nothing. And if you were a Shakespearean, you would echo Lear’s declaration that ‘Nothing shall come of Nothing’. It is possible to take words by their collars and mug them, when nobody is looking – disfigure them, torment them, twist and turn them upside down, like victims of a schoolyard bully – till they lose all resemblance to themselves and turn purple in their faces. It is possible to string together innocuous words that make sense, as a unit, in themselves and yet fall apart when they talk to each other, all we have is a cacophonic babble of empty signifiers and unmoored meanings. The only way to navigate through the treacherous surfaces of these words and their worldlessness is to resort to producing dictionaries, thesauruses, glossaries, and when all else fails, new lexicons to accommodate for the thisness and thatness of the verbal big bang we are all a part of.

This online forum paves the way for next year’s International Congress of Error and Errorism to be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on the occasion of the bicentennial of South American independence – or two hundred years of error in Latin America. The point is to deepen our level of error in anticipation of the Congress. It is not clear to the organizers who in their right mind yet, with enough money to fund such an endeavor, would agree to part with it for such a carnival of gleeful and erroneous folly!

Here are the audio files from the Unspeakably More weekend at Periferry on the Brahmaputra.
It's only 10 hours and there are 19 files in total.

Enjoy!

http://northeastwestsouth.net/uploads/UnspeakablyMoreDay1a.mp3
http://northeastwestsouth.net/uploads/UnspeakablyMoreDay1b.mp3
http://northeastwestsouth.net/uploads/UnspeakablyMoreDay1c.mp3
http://northeastwestsouth.net/uploads/UnspeakablyMoreDay1d.mp3
http://northeastwestsouth.net/uploads/UnspeakablyMoreDay1e.mp3

Nishant Shah has kicked-off a series of month-long forums with 'A brief treatise on the despair of meaning Or The Pointlessness of Everything' that will elaborate on words or phrases for an ever-growing lexicon.

Please see the blog entry Easy Listening for the sound files of the weekend.

The "Shadow Search" launched by n.e.w.s. on 15 October closed yesterday, 22 November. The Call was read by a record number of people (and machines). Five proposals were received for consideration by the reading committee. After some five hours of spirited deliberation, the jury found itself at loggerheads. The deciding vote was cast by the n.e.w.s. collective in favour of "Narcissus Search Engine," submitted by Aharon Amir and Phil Jones.

The jury was immediately struck both by the quality and the heterogeneity of the submissions, and divergent opinions notwithstanding, was unanimous in seeing the experience as a learning process.

n.e.w.s. hopes to work with all the participants in further developing their proposals. Any and all readers are also encouraged to contact the authors of the submissions -- published here under n.e.w.s,' site-wide creative commons license -- to help carry them forward.

Wednesday 25 November, 6-8 pm
University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Bachelard Amphitheatre

On the one-year anniversary of the attribution of the first prize in the Competition of Ideas – organized by Jacques Serrano and the Forum européen de l’essai sur l’art – to the n.e.w.s. collective, for our now upcoming book Arbitrating Attention, a critical discussion of the research to date will be held at the Sorbonne in Paris, co-organized by the Forum européen de l’essai sur l’art and the CERAP.

In the course of researching my end of our upcoming book on shadow practices, I have been grappling with the ethics and politics of trying to detect and draw even modest attention to initiatives that have deliberately sought to impair their coefficient of specific visibility. More on that to come. But I guess the most radical way for an artist to get off – and stay off – artworld radar screens is simply to quit the artworld. To bail, but to do so as an – ultimate – artistic gesture. Berlin-based theorist Alexander Koch has initiated and carried out some fascinating research on this unwritten chapter of contemporary art history – the history and conditions of possibility of what he calls the Kunstausstieg (http://www.kunst-verlassen.de/). Here’s an excerpt from our recent exchange.

At Khoj@1Shanti Road , n.e.w.s. (Stephen Wright, Prayas Abhinav, Renée Ridgway) made a public presentation of recent projects in India and discussed the research for their forthcoming book, Arbitrating Attention: reinvesting attention surplus in plausible artworlds that seeks to rethink the social and economic conditions of art.Khoj@1ShantiRoad As twenty-first century attention economics maintains its momentum, where an artist's standing in the reputational economy is determined by his or her coefficient of specific visibility, how can shadowy, more poly-vocal initiatives at the edges find ways to surface, or, for that matter, to remain hidden? What are the specific new vocabularies, technologies even, with respect to modes of transmitting knowledge that might be used as deframing devices?Yes Men